OCZ Vertex 3 Overview
Once again this is a pre-release engineering sample of the drive so the drive itself is plain. OCZ is still using the same 2.5-inch form factor as most of their solid state drives. The drive has a black aluminum casing.

Flipping the drive over it is also plain except for a sticker showing the serial number etc. Just like all SATA drives on the back you have your power and data connections.

Ok so I know you’ve been waiting for this, let’s open the drive up. To do so just remove the 4 small screws on the back of the drive. Once you do that carefully remove the backside of the drive to reveal the green PCB on the inside.

The first thing that stands out when you open the drive is the SF-2200 controller, which sits towards the center of the drive. The SF-2281VA1-SDC-ES chip boasts read speeds of 550MB/s, write speeds of 525MB/s and 60K+ IOPS! Moving on down the drive you have 8 MLC flash NAND chips.

If we remove 4 more screws we can take the entire PCB out to reveal 8 more flash chips on the back. They are labeled 29F128G08CFAAB, I really could not find out much information on these chips, but OCZ tells us they are the new Micron 2Xnm NAND components. Each of the 16 chips have a 16GB capacity, giving you a total of 256GB. The drive is advertised as a 240GB drive, so the extra space is left over for over provisioning.